But first, part two on The Mill at Vicksburg.

John Kern and Jackie Koney detail what it takes to sustainably restore and save a 100-year-old paper mill.

(gentle music) So I wanna kind of start with really The Mill, because that's the buzz, that's what's going around with the buzz.

Talk about the visionary.

Chris Moore, who is behind the whole project, I mean, without him and this beautiful dream, it would be nothing, right?

- Yeah, that's the absolute truth.

So, Chris's families have been in Vicksburg since before Michigan was a state, so on his father's and his mother's side.

His grandfather was the chief engineer of the mill for many years.

His father was the purchasing manager.

Chris and his brother worked at the mill during high school to make money for college, so there's a deep, deep history with the place, the mill itself.

And as far as the area, yeah, his family has been here forever.

So deep, deep connection to this place.

And when he found out from his mother that the mill might possibly get torn down, that's when he stepped in and said, "Well, maybe there's something I can do with it."

- Yeah, I mean, I look at the enormity of this project, and for a lot of people, it would scare people away because he's big into sustainability as well.

It's not just rebuilding or tearing down and doing something different, it's important for him to have the historical value attached to it as well.

And life in Vicksburg, at a time, really centered around that paper mill, didn't it?

- Yeah.

Well, you know, I could talk about this for hours.

It really is a tremendous story.

Yes, the mill opened in 1904, and for 97 years, it was kind of the cultural and economic hub of this town, and the town grew up around it.

And when the mill shut down in 2001, it was obviously very difficult for the town, just like many other places in the state and in the country, when the big mill closes down, what do you do next?

As far as the sustainability goes, that's a whole nother big story.

We understand that the mill, it wasn't a healthy operation.

Making paper can be tough on the environment, whether it's the creek or it's the grounds or whatever.

So the idea is that we heal the land, we heal the property, and we do things the right way going forward so that we can be a symbol of how to do these kinds of redevelopments right.

- And the project itself, it's daunting.

The project is daunting.

The building is 420,000 square feet and it's got 17 acres of roof and 650 windows to remove infill from and it's on 120 acres.

When you start to bat around numbers like that, you get a better feel for the kind of "oh my goodness" element of this whole thing.

- So what do you see?

I mean, this is a big project.

What's the timeline and what's the vision when The Mill is completed?

- We've been working on it for quite a while.

(laughs) We are anticipating that the facility would be done by the end of 2026.

That at least some parts of it will be open.

That's been a debate.

Do we open in phases or do we open it up all at once?

And that's still a little bit of a debate.

But as far as the overall vision for it, it really hasn't changed much since the first day that Chris stood on the property and said, "Oh, I can see people drinking beer and listening to music."

(laughs) So that's the basis of everything, is that we wanna be a destination.

We're planning on being a national destination that's based on beer, events, and music, and then with an arts and culture thread.

We will have hotels, a hotel space.

We'll have at least 75 rooms.

We're trying to push it to more hotel rooms.

We're going to have a few museums in there.

There'll be a brewery museum on Breweriana, which is marketing and advertising materials for breweries.

So like, could be signs, billboards, could be taps, cans, all those kinds of things, marketing and advertising materials.

We'll have an old stove museum because if people don't already know, Kalamazoo is also known for being a creator of Kalamazoo stoves and the area made lots and lots of stoves back in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

- [John] And that would be those old, potbelly stoves.

Very, very ornate.

- [Jackie] And then paper.

We wanna celebrate the history and the paper making of this area, so there'll be some level of a museum to The Mill.

So whether it's the people, the processes, the machines in the area, and our paper-making legacy.

- When you think about actually redoing a building, it's not like you can just go out and buy some bricks to replace some of the bricks that are deteriorating.

- The Mill itself has about 3.2 million bricks.

So the bricks specifically, at original count, we thought we would need about, mm, 80,000 new bricks to replace some of the old bricks.

It's 1903 brick, and it's called Chicago Common.

Outside of Chicago, there was a racetrack that was torn down, and the amount of bricks that they had that were actually reusable was 80,000.

So it was just what we needed, and we brought those in.

But then, over time, we end up, you know, more damage happened and we needed more bricks, and we figured we needed at least another 50, 70, thousand bricks or whatever.

And so then they went on the search again, and then they found an old, old brewery that was being torn down outside of Milwaukee.

And that had just the right amount of bricks that we needed.

So we've had two shipments of bricks come in from old buildings being torn down so that we could use old bricks instead of having to fabricate new bricks.

- And that's in keeping with that whole sustainability initiative.

The act of saving the building itself.

You know, the first paper went off the line at the paper mill in 1905.

And so saving a building of that age is just something that isn't really done.

- [Jackie] It's hard to do.

It's expensive and it's hard to do.

So yeah, the bricks are one thing, another thing that this story makes me think about is that there were a number of buildings that we tore down that were non-historic and/or failing.

And instead of taking all of that trash and taking dump trucks into the landfill, what we did is we hired a company to bring a big grinder in, and they came in and they ground all of the foundations of those buildings and we have a massive pile of aggregate that we're going to reuse for the base of our sidewalks and driveways and things.

And by the time we do the interior demo of the building, we'll probably have a pile that's three times the size.

But the pile that we have currently kept 500 dump trucks off of the roads and out of the landfill, and I think John has-- we figured out that it would be about 17 miles of sidewalk that it would be able to.

- Yeah, about three miles of road.

- Yeah, three miles of road or 17 miles of sidewalk, something like that.

So we're doing those kinds of things the best we can.

- But as we get a little closer, we'll check in with you again, but thank you so much for talking with me here today.

- Oh, thank you.

It was really fun to have this nice chat with you.

We appreciate it.

- What a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

- [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.